Nature may select to kill humans. Climate change is inevitable. Humans are the cause recently. Acceleration of warming is a particularly interesting consequence of human activity. Neither nation nor cohort can stop it. No living organism is immune from death. The universe is as indifferent to human existence as to any other life form. Chaos and energy rule orderliness.
The indifference of the universe is distinct from the insouciance of Earth’s nature. Life organizes. Species flock. Even proto-life organizes. Most famous is the formation of amino acids in the Miller experiment: (water+ammonia+methane+hydrogen+lightning=amino acids); and the Pappelis proto-cell experiment (aspartic acid+water+heat= proto-cell-like microspheres). Life forms, proto-life and quasi-life (viruses, viroids, prions) all replicate.
All Earth’s organisms are regulated by complex feedback systems of dynamic natural, biological, global ecosystems. When thresholds are exceeded, collapse is ordinary – humans cannot escape this rule.
Will man-made climate change kill man? Let’s speculate. Atmospheric warming causes ice melting. Of special interest is land-ice melting principally from Antarctica and Greenland. Land-ice melting will cause sea levels to rise (ice on land + warmth = water flowing to seas). This is not a complicated scientific prediction – it has happened before. Sea level rise causes coastal areas to flood. Millions die. Human built infrastructure is disrupted; millions more die. More wetlands are created. Perhaps disease among coastal survivors and elsewhere accelerates.
Much later, the global ecosystems establish new feedback mechanisms. More climate change results. More humans die. And so on. The new feedback mechanisms continue to seek new equilibriums.
Perhaps we are killing our own species in yet a new way here, death by manufactured extinction. Since humans first appeared through today, our species kills. Our species kills promiscuously; it kills each other individually, tribally, nationally, and globally. It kills every other species. It kills not only for food or survival, but for any old reason.
The radical climate change we are forcing upon ourselves may be a component of a new, natural feedback mechanism to control our human population. The complex global ecosystems with all their complex feedback mechanisms may be zeroing-in on killing the source of their recent dis-equilibration – us.
Nature is just doing its job as indifferently as always.